[Catalog-sig] ANN: PyPM Index

["Martin v. Löwis"]

> Out of curiosity, wasn't there some musing earlier that people shouldn't be
> mirroring PyPI data in a commercial context? Or at least should offer some
> kind of opt-out?

I personally don't object to such activities, as long as the offering is
not misleading (e.g. by suggesting that you have to pay for software
that is actually available for free as well). I'd rather see the free
market decide on the fate of such services.

In the specific case, the service being offered apparently is to provide
prebuilt packages. Denying such a service would be unfair, IMO, as other
companies/organizations are also allowed to distribute Python packages,
often in a repackaged form (e.g. Ubuntu packages or the Enthought
distribution).

Of course, it would be the responsibility of the distributor of such
a repackaging to comply to the respective licenses of each package.
Using the metadata, this might still be possible in an automated manner.
If authors feel that their licensing conditions are violated, they
should contact ActiveState and ask for corrections.

OTOH, I'm not surprised by opposition to this kind of service, since
people might mistake the web pages as suggesting that you actually need
to use pypm to install the respective packages - when this is actually
only needed to install the PyPM build, and you might well get around
installing it just as easily in a different form.

Regards,
Martin